mediawiki

Using an out-of-the-box MediaWiki installation in the Amazon EC2 environment behind an Elastic Load Balancer and CloudFlare as a DNS provider, every user’s IP address will show as the load balancer’s IP address. For obvious reasons, this is not ideal, but is easy to remedy.

Then, the TrustedXFF MediaWiki extension needs to be installed, and the CloudFlare IP addresses should be added to the trusted-hosts.txt document. The extension handles the IP range syntax used by CloudFlare, so a direct copy of the IPv4 text file is sufficient. In addition, add your elastic load balancer IP address/range so that proxy will also be whitelisted.

Edit generate.php – find the location where a “Range too big” error could be thrown. On the line above this, change the 8192 limit to 132192. This will ensure all CloudFlare IP addresses are added. If you run into performance problems later, start removing the lesser-used ISPs from the bottom of the trusted-hosts.txt document.

If your server is not live, add the require_once line to your LocalSettings.php. Then, run the generate.php script that came with the extension.

If your server is live, you will need to specify the installation location on the command line (mediawiki_directory/cache/trusted-xff.cdb by default).

The generate.php file will create a database of IP addresses that will be used as trusted proxies. Since you added CloudFlare’s IP addresses, you should now see the actual IP address of the user.

Happy birthday, Wikipedia! The world has changed a lot since 2001, and Wikipedia has been along for the ride. The open source software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki, is used for a large number of wikis around the globe. In fact, Hollow Developers has utilized MediaWiki for over 5 years at The World Called Hollow. Hollow’s community wiki contains extensive documentation about the world, and has been carefully crafted by the players of the game.

A wiki provides a great way for many people to collaborate on the same document. Companies are increasingly looking to wikis to provide support for employees, and MediaWiki is a great tool to accomplish this goal.